Thoughts on green living
December 9, 2009
Environmentally-friendly lifestyle advices are the main topic of many publications and web sites created in the last years. Even though being a realtor from Toronto gives me plenty of occasions to talk about the many ways of eco-friendly living with my clients, my topic today will be a bit more specific. My aim today is not to cover the whole topic of environmentally conscious living, giving all the tips you’ve probably heard before. Our today’s topic will be the three everyday items that we usually don’t even consider to be an issue: food, water and electricity.
Food
Since the majority of people (I would like to believe!) regularly recycle paper, glass and tins, most of your common waste is probably composted of groceries. The majority of this food rubbish is often still in its original packaging and in a good condition. We can find out that out of all the groceries that Canadian households pick out and pay for in shops, 20 to 30% eventually ends up in the dustbin. If we include all the food that is wasted in shops and restaurants, we come to the conclusion that some 7 to 14 billion tons of groceries is thrown away every year. That is worth $3 to 5 billion Canadian dollars per year.
Now you are probably shocked by these numbers, aren’t you? With so many charities trying to help people suffering from lack of food, while at the same time so much of it is being wasted straight under our noses. But wait before you start packing the groceries you are not going to eat and sending it to places full of hungry people. There are some other things you might want to consider instead of throwing the food away. 1. Try to use the residue food when cooking your next meal. If you made too much rice for supper yesterday, you might want to put it in stuffed peppers filling today. 2. In your food cabinet, always stock food that’s closest to the expiration date in front of food that last longer. 3. Sometimes you realize you have some groceries you are not going to use before its expiry date and you would have to dump it. Try to take these to your local charity place or soup kitchen or any similar place where they can find some use for the food before it goes bad. As hungry people don’t live only in Africa, your food will serve a useful purpose even in your city. 4. Do not waste leftovers – mulch it. Always try to think in the way that groceries just shouldn’t be dumped. If you don’t own a garden yourself, try to find someone who does and can do the mulching.
Water
You probably already know many advices on how to prevent using more water than necessary in your household. But now let’s focus on lavatories, as they are an important part of our home and also may be of key importance in how much water is used in the household. We got used to using toilets so much that we no more think of them – as long as they function the way the are supposed to. But try to find out the amount of water your household uses every month just for flushing the lavatory. You might be shocked by the big number you get out of this. But it doesn’t need to be that much, there are some ways of reducing the amount of water needed for every flushing. There are two different methods to achieve that. 1. There are new models of toilets available, that are using just the minimum amount of water necessary. Go and check out the assortment in your local shop, it is amazing how rich it is nowadays! 2. If you put a couple of plastic bottles full of water into the tank of your lavatory, it will help you to save some water for flushing too. Keep testing to discover how little water is enough for the lavatory to function properly.
Electricity
Here the situation is similar to the one with water and wasting it – there are a lot of advices on how to save electric energy to be found in books, magazines and on the Internet. But one of the machines that needs vast amounts of electricity is one that you might be using daily: a tumble dryer. The popularity of tumble dryers comes from the practice that modern people want everything to be done in the shortest time possible, regardless of the amount of resources that are wasted in the process of speeding things up. It is quite obvious that in our current lifestyle, there is not enough time for doing the laundry manually, and that dishwashers do really save some water. Though the advantages of a tumble dryer might be less clear. Would it be such a great obstacle if we just waited 1 – 2 days for our clothes to get dry? If you really want to “live green”, use your tumble dryer only in emergencies or get rid of it (sell it) altogether. Not only the environment will be grateful for your decision, but also you will pay less for electricity.
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